Do you ever find yourself wondering ... where did all the tea go? I bought so much and now all I have is half a toucha of mediocre 2010 sheng?Or, do you have so many great teas to drink you wonder if you'll get to them all?

I used to be a major hoarder ... being a green tea drinker ... not a good way to go. I remember being in a near panic mode and stressed worrying how will I drink all the green teas in a timely manner.

Years later I am feeling pretty balanced. I generally keep a steady flow of tea in and tea drunk. Rarely do I feel like, omg ... how will I finish this tea while it is still fresh. I feel ... "balanced."

I focus on drinking rather than hording. But to save on shipping costs when placing orders, which mostly occure from specialized vendors, I often find myself at any one point in time heavy in certain areas and light in other areas. I try to work through everything as quick as possible, but I do know some teas have a much shorter time frame than others, and I try to adhere to those time frames. I place about one order each month, and those tend to be Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese, or Japanese based depending on which area I need to replace the most.

That being said, that does not mean that I have not amassed a large quantity of tea. I do work on clearing out what I have but MarshalN recentliy posted a blog post involving a clear rating of a tea is how quickly you use it up once starting it. That being said I have some rather bad teas, that have stuck around for a very long time, while others I work on saving intentionally, some just end up being kept for a long time because I don't want to drink them.

I always buy tea with the intention of drinking it but it happens quite frequently, while sipping on hung shui, that I think:" This tea is good, I just wonder how it'll taste in a few years." So that way I always end up storing the tea. The same can be said about my beers and wines... it seems I can never find the right occasion to open that special bottle

I started out buying overlarge quantities of too many teas, as I was trying to explore and everything looked so good to me. It wasn't hoarding, but ignorance about how fast I could go through tea.

Then there was the 'what am I going to do with all of this tea' phase, but that one was partly solved by letting some of the long-untouched teas go for composting.

Now I'm trying to check the tea stock before buying any new teas, and doing a lot better, but still I've run into a few situations where I bought more of a tea I really enjoyed, and doled out the tea so sparingly, forgetting how much I had, that some of it sat too long and lost it's mojo.

So, not yet 100% balanced, but the majority of my teas that are sitting in the tea trunk are puerhs and the sort of traditional oolong that don't spoil.

I usually only buy 150g or less of a tea at a time, unless it's a pu erh bing. I do have quite a few smaller bags. I have a bag of bags I fly with that has at least 30 kinds of tea in it, but I'm usually too busy on the road to make any serious dent in it.

I do, however, have a few 600g bags of cheaper tea I bought locally in HK that are probably going to be around for a while!

If for green tea, I would choose "I drink most of it". But some teas give you good excuse to stock up But for green tea, I think it's a sin to let good tea wasted. In recent years, my resolution is to finish drinking all green tea (or all green tea that's not supposed to be stored for long) before Chinese new year of each year. I never made it but got closer each year

I try to drink all of my tea, even if I don't like it too much. I'll make cup after cup in an attempt to finish it, but if I find something better I like, I'll put the bad one aside in favor of the new one.